HMS Hardy (F54): The First Type 14 Frigate, Sunk by Exocet and Sea Skua

The First of Her Type

HMS Hardy was built by Yarrow Shipbuilders, with construction beginning on 4 February 1953 and launched on 25 November that year, holding the distinction of being the very first Type 14 Blackwood-class frigate completed for the Royal Navy, the lead ship of a class of purpose-built anti-submarine escorts.

She displaced 1,456 tons at full load, measured 310 feet in length and could reach 27 knots, with a complement of 112 and an armament of three 40mm Bofors guns alongside two Limbo Mark 10 anti-submarine mortars, a notably focused design built around one job, hunting Soviet submarines, rather than trying to be a jack of all trades.

She was formally acquired by the Royal Navy on 8 December 1955 and commissioned that same month, on 15 December.

Three Decades of Steady Service

HMS Hardy served initially with the Third Training Squadron at Londonderry, before transferring to Portland in 1957, and underwent modernisation in 1960 that saw her join the Twentieth Frigate Squadron.

Through the 1970s she carried out Exclusive Economic Zone patrols, part of the Royal Navy's ongoing responsibility for protecting British fishing and offshore interests, and attended the Silver Jubilee Fleet Review at Spithead in 1977, a proud moment for a frigate by then already well into her third decade of service.

By October 1979, with her front line usefulness diminishing, she was reassigned to the rather less glamorous role of stores accommodation ship at Portsmouth.

Sunk by Exocet and Sea Skua

HMS Hardy's final chapter came in 1984, when she was selected as a target vessel for a Sinking Exercise, or SINKEX, in the Western Approaches, a live-fire test used to evaluate the real-world destructive power of modern anti-ship weapons against an actual warship hull rather than a theoretical target.

She was struck first by live Exocet and Sea Skua missiles, the very weapons that had proven so devastating during the Falklands War two years earlier, before torpedo strikes blew off her bow entirely.

Further shelling and mortar charges followed, and on 3 July 1984, both the main section of the ship and her separated bow were finally sent to the bottom by 20mm cannon fire from HMS Charybdis, a thorough and rather sobering end for the first ship of her class, whose own hull ultimately helped the Royal Navy better understand exactly what its modern weapons could do to a steel warship.